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This paper examines the influence of European integration on the relationship between state administration and private interests in the four Nordic countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. By private interests I mean interest organizations, private corporations and independent experts. The paper focuses exclusively on the national policy processes that are involved with managing European Union (EU) issues. More specifically, this paper discusses two aspects of multi-level governance. First is the important role of private interests in the coordination of decision making at the national level preceding their government’s representation of national interests in the European Council of Ministers and other EU organizations. Second is the effect of all this on national democratic systems.

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Professionals and organizations both seek to exploit and cooperate with each other. Professionals
seek alliances in their own peer networks while organizations do the same. These networks carry
not only information that inform incentives but norms about appropriate forms of governance
and practices that guide how they actually work. In this paper we outline how professionals and
organizations operate in two-level networks through a focus on issue control over issues of
transnational governance. As such, this interdisciplinary paper brings together insights from
Organization Studies and International Relations to discuss how professionals and organizations
battle over issue control through the designation of tasks and the creation of overlapping
networks. We outline the emergence of ‘issue professionals’ and how they attempt network
management. We do so via a case on transnational sustainability certification that demonstrates
how issue professionals are engaged in two-level networks.

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Comparative political economy has been dominated since the 1970s by two waves of research. The first one examined how different types of policy-making regimes affect policy making and, in turn, national economic competitiveness (e.g., Katzenstein 1978). The second one studied how different types of production regimes affect national competitiveness (e.g., Hall and Soskice 2001). Absent from all of this is much discussion about knowledge regimes. Knowledge regimes are sets of actors, organizations, and institutions that produce and disseminate policy ideas that affect how policy-making and production regimes are organized and operate in the first place. Knowledge regimes are important because they contribute data, research, theories, policy recommendations, and other ideas that influence public policy and, thus, national economic competitiveness (Baab 2001; Campbell 1998; Pedersen 2006).

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This paper develops the concept of knowledge regime and shows how knowledge regimes
vary across the two most basic varieties of capitalism: liberal and coordinated market economies. The key
questions motivating this paper are whether there are different types of knowledge regimes associated with
different varieties of capitalism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; how they generate
policy ideas; and how they disseminate these ideas to policy makers. Hence, this paper begins to fill an
important blind spot in the comparative political economy and varieties of capitalism literatures.

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Who drives domestic institutional change in the face of international economic crisis? For rationalists the answer is powerful self-interested actors who struggle for material gains during an exogenously generated crisis. For economic constructivists it is ideational entrepreneurs who use ideas as weapons to establish paths for institutional change during crisis-driven uncertainty. Both approaches are elite-centric and conceive legitimacy as established by command or proclamation. This article establishes why domestic institutional change in response to international economic constraints must be legitimated by non-elites and how their everyday actions alter policy paths established in crisis. This is illustrated by re-examining a case frequently associated with punctuated equilibrium theories of crisis and institutional change: interwar Britain. In contrast to conventional explanations, I argue that the "legitimacy gap" between elite and broader public understandings about how the economy should work informed institutional experimentation during the 1920s and 1930s and fertilized the "Keynesian Revolution" of the 1940s.

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In this paper technical standardisation is understood and explained in a model where economic analysis is coupled with an analysis of the political system as proposed in rational choice theory. The aim is to answer both the question why various countries (e.g. the United States versus European countries) let either the market or public intervention determine the mode of technical standardisation and the possible implications of these two ways of organizing technical standardisation from an economic and a political point of view. Based upon the analysis of the paper a couple of general policy recommendations are made concerning the mode of technical standardisation.
Keywords: Rational choice, market failures, technical standards, standardisation, government failures.

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A Route to a New Negotiating Order in High Performance Work Organizations?

Hull Kristensen, Peer(Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Contrary to a widely held view, rather than seeing the certification of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) as a barrier to increasing employee participation, this article views new ways of structuring participation as a necessary step towards making improvements in OHS management systems. The article first considers how work organization has changed and then in a similar way traces how bargaining has shifted from being distributive to become integrative to create a fundamental change in the negotiation regime. Finally, by analysing an OHS-certified firm in greater depth, the article shows how solutions for improvements in OHS management and notable bottom-up formulations of OHS benchmarks may help us discover how the organizational form of firms in which high-performance work organization can be developed through new participative structures.

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Lessons to be learned from the "hidden” committees of the Nordic Council of Ministers

Nedergaard, Peter(København, 2006)

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In spite of their long history and extensive activities, the international committees of the Nordic Council of Ministers have not hitherto been subject to scholarly examination. This paper demonstrates that valuable lessons can be learned about policy learning in practise and theoretically by analysing the cooperation in the committees of the Nordic Council of Ministers. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as the starting point, fifteen hypotheses on policy learning are tested. Among other things, it is concluded that in order to maximise policy learning in international committees, committees should avoid fragmentation into coalitions, be open to public opinion, participants in committees should be driven by a sense of purpose rather that material interest, empirical data should be made available to committees, a neutral presidency should be present in order to act as an authoritative persuader, and neutral scientists should participate, although not necessarily scientists from consultancy firms.

Over the last three decades, EU regulation of the internal market has become highly pervasive,
affecting practically all the domains of European citizens’ lives. Many studies have focused on
understanding the process and causes of regulatory reform. However, these have typically been
small-scale or small-n studies, with no or limited attempts to analyse the more general sources of
regulatory reform. In this paper, we focus on the determinants of stability and change in EU
regulation. We develop an original dataset of 169 pieces of legislation (regulations, directives and
decisions) across eight different sectors, and analyse the dynamics of regulatory reform in the EU.
Using time series analysis of count data, we find evidence that the number of winning coalitions in
the Council and the size of EU membership have a significant impact on regulatory reform in the
EU. However, the political (left-right) composition of EU’s legislative bodies has no significant
impact on the process of regulatory reform.

Quasi-public institutions are significant but unsung players in the contemporary international financial order. What can be understood as quasi-public institutions (QPIs) have been created by states or private associations to provide a means of mediating private capital with public value, typically attracting domestic and international investment in order to foster and further a domestic agenda that has strong support from the broader population. As such they fit awkwardly with common perceptions of the international political economy as dominated institutions that reflect either state or market interests. QPIs do both and have emerged as institutional responses to domestic crises that then go on to have a role in shaping the world economy. QPIs that issue collaterized securities from mortgage credit, be they public or private in origin, reflect this institutional form given that their purpose is to bring together private capital and public value. This purpose also makes QPIs sensitive to everyday politics, given that they were created to reflect a broad social purpose rather than only elite interests. This article discusses the development of QPIs for mortgage bonds in a liberal market economy, the U.S., and a coordinated market economy, Denmark. I suggest that QPIs’ values have been challenged by de-regulatory and re-regulatory trends in recent decades. I suggest that QPIs call upon us to question how we identify actors in the international financial order as either public or private, and the importance of everyday politics in fostering institutional innovations that have significant knock-on effects for the world economy.

This article discusses how institutional competitiveness and multinationals are mutually enriching concepts. Seen from the perspective of Multinationals, institutional competitiveness becomes expressed at two levels. At the level of corporate HQs institutional competitiveness proves itself by forming firms capable of expanding internationally. At the level of subsidiaries as providing institutional back up for these firms’ abilities to fight for survival and growth within the frame of rivalling subsidiaries of the MNC. The article discusses at these two levels the comparative institutional competitiveness of Liberal Market Economies and Coordinated Markets Economies under the current competitive regime.

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Mutual learning among the Member States is the primary purpose of the employment policy of the European Union. The two most important questions in this regard are how learning occurs and how much learning takes place. In this article I argue that the existing analyses of the effects of learning in the European employment strategy have been either determined by the sender’s interests or have underestimated how mutual learning between countries takes place. In stead the article develops a constructivist approach to learning and uses it to generate some concrete hypothesis about when learning in committees is most likely to take place. Afterwards, this constructivist approach is used to analyse the institutional framework surrounding the European employment strategy in order to evaluate whether the potential for learning is optimal. Finally, the article concludes that even though some basic premises for learning is fulfilled, the potential for mutual learning could and should be increased by implemented at range of concrete institutional reforms. Firstly, a range of professional and autonomous sub-committees which reports to the EMCO should be established. Secondly, the EMCO should be given more time to discuss the national action plans in meetings which more loosely defined agendas. Thirdly, the cooperation should be concentrated around the areas where the differences in terms of policy performances among the Member States are greatest. Fourthly, the president of the EMCO should be given a more prominent role at the expense of the Commission. Finally, the members of the EMCO should to a higher extent come from the directorates in the Member states rather than the minister’s departments.

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This paper is about Poulantzas, historical materialism, international relations, and the current
crisis. My purpose is to discuss how some Poulantzian theoretical contributions can be applied
to the study of subject matters that are the focus of academic fields such as International
Relations (IR), International Political Economy (IPE), International Politics, World Politics
and others. I deliberately abstain from singling out any of these disciplines or fields or labels
and from trying to define them precisely, because one of my arguments is that historical materialism
(HM) is a research program2 that contains its own theoretical definition of the object
under study. This object, with inspiration from Poulantzas’ notion of the imperialist chain and
his general theory of society, I will define as the global social formation or for short, world
society.

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This is a slightly revised version of an article I published in 1991 (Ove K. Pedersen,
1991, “Nine Questions to a Neo-Institutional Theory in Political Science”,
Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, p. 125-148). The purpose of the article 16
years ago is the same as the purpose of presenting this note today - to point to a number
of methodological and theoretical problems which have to be discussed in connection
with a theory of institutional change. No analytical approach for the study of institutions
will be presented. No description of actual institutions or institutional change will be
given. Rather, nine philosophical-methodological questions rarely raised and never
answered in institutional theory will be asked.

The analysis in this paper concerns how national institutions impact the implementation of occupational healthy and safety management systems (OHSMS) in different types of market economies. The main objective is to show how variation in national institutional frameworks influences the implementation of OHSMS, and thus, relative performance. There are two main conclusions. First, dominating organisational templates and co-operative industrial relations structures allow firms from coordinated market economies (CME) to more effectively implement OHSMS than those from liberal market economies (LME) which are embedded in adversarial industrial relations. Secondly, due to differences in the institutional framework among countries, the mechanisms of enforcement for OHSMS need to be designed in different ways. The article contributes to the literature by showing that the implementation and functioning of OHSMS are mediated by the different institutional logics in which firms are embedded.

The purpose of this paper is to address two normative and interlinked methodological and theoretical questions concerning the Open Method of Coordination (OMC): First, what is the most appropriate approach to learning in the analyses of the processes of the European Employment Strategy (EES)? Second, how should mutual learning processes be diffused among the Member States in order to be efficient? In answering these two questions the paper draws on a social constructivist approach to learning thereby contributing to the debate about learning in the political science literature. At the same time, based on the literature and participatory observations, it is concluded that the learning effects of the EES are probably somewhat larger than what is normally suggested, but that successful diffusion still depends on a variety of contextual factors. At the end of the paper a path for empirical research based upon a social constructivist approach to learning is suggested.